Manga Review: Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwaaki

Round about the second or third time that one of the shape-shifting Parasytes of Hitoshi Iwaaki's sci-fi horror manga transformed to separate some poor slob's head from their body, I began to think of John Carpenter's 1982 movie remake of The Thing. In that flawed, but entertaining, low-budgeter, there's a scene where one of the movie's stranded Antarctic scientists appears to have suffered a heart attack, leading the base physician to attempt to revive him with defibrillator paddles. Unfortunately for our doc, the seemingly dead human is an alien whose torso quickly (courtesy fx great Rob Bottin) shifts into a giant fanged mouth that severs both of the would-be caregiver's hands. It's the kind of bloody visual moment that's make or break for the audience: either you accept it with a whoa! and perhaps a small chuckle – or you drop out of the movie altogether.

Same goes with Iwaaki's horror tale. Twenty pages into the first chapter, we get a scene where a parasite-controlled husband chomps off the head of his wife. In it, the no-longer-human approaches his apron-bedecked missus, and as he holds onto her shoulders, his head splits open, looking at first like some carnivorous flower than like some Lovecraftian sea creature with fangs and a plethora of eyes. As he bites and removes his mate's pate, his own head appears as large as a watermelon – an image both grisly and comically cartoonish. Hey, the reader wonders, where's the guy's brain located, anyway?

Physical transmogrifications, both horrifying and comic, figure prominently in Parasyte, courtesy of an untold number of wormy creatures that mysteriously land throughout Earth to take over human hosts. Entering their victims' heads through the ear canals while they're sleeping, they eat their victims' brains and take over the bodies. When self-described "good-hearted high school boy" hero Izumi Shinichi is chosen by one of these creatures, though, there's a small glitch. Because the boy is lying in bed wearing earphones, his would-be feaster is forced to find another orifice into the kid's head. Before this can occur, however, Shinichi wakes and is horrified to see what appears to be a large snake in his futon. The parasite bores into Shinichi's palm and attempts to reach the brain by going up his arm, but our hero holds it back with a tourniquet. As a result of this quick-thinking act, the creature is unable to get to our boy's skull before it matures inside his body. ("I matured before I could eat your brain," the creature later nonchalantly notes. "Such a shame.") Instead of being able to commandeer his host, the parasite can only control Shinichi's right arm and hand.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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